US Release of Unredacted JFK Files 'Doxxed' Officials, Including Social Security Numbers
"I intend to sue the National Archives," said Joseph diGenova, an 80-year-old former Trump campaign lawyer (and a U.S. Attorney from 1983 to 1988). While releasing 63,000 unredacted pages about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. government erroneously "made public the Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information of potentially hundreds of former congressional staffers and other people," reports USA Today. ("It is virtually impossible to tell the scope of the breach because the National Archives put them online without a way to search them by keyword, some JFK files experts and victims of the information release told USA TODAY...") Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represented current and former spies and other officials in cases against the government, told USA Today that he "saw a few names I know and I informed them of the breach... Hundreds were doxxed but of that number I don't know how many are still living."Zaid, who has fought for decades for the JFK records to be made public, said many of the thousands of investigative documents had been made public long ago with everything declassified and unredacted except for the personal information. Releasing that information now, he told USA TODAY, poses significant threats to those whose information is now public, including dates and places of birth, but especially their Social Security numbers. "The purpose of the release was to inform the public about the JFK assassination, not to help permit identity theft of those who actually investigated the events of that day," Zaid said.The Associated Press reported Thursday afternoon that government officials "said they are still screening the records to identify all the Social Security numbers that were released."One of the newly unredacted documents... discloses the Social Security numbers of more than two dozen people seeking security clearances in the 1990s to review JFK-related documents for the Assassination Records Review Board.
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